Forget sticky notes, Microsoft using inkblots as password reminders

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“Part of the reason to make this publicly available is to do in some sense a broader user study using the Internet population,” said Elson. “What we are hoping is if the InkblotPassword site gets popular we will be able to publish a follow-on paper [to the 2004 research] that has additional data for a much larger population.”

On the InkblotPassword.com site, Microsoft says a century of psychological literature indicates that inkblot associations are “intimately personal.” The company confirmed those findings with its own research done by Dan Simon of Microsoft Research and Adam Stubblefield, who was an intern in 2004 and is now an assistant research professor at Johns Hopkins University.

The two researchers found that different users almost always describe the same inkblot in different ways. That type of personalization, they concluded, leads to passwords with “high entropy,” which means they are hard to guess.

The researchers reported that people find their associations to be very memorable because the mental images they associate with the inkblots are hard to forget. They said users eventually develop “muscle memory” and can log in without referring to the inkblot images.